The Festival

FMM Sines - Festival Músicas do Mundo is a music festival held every July in the municipality of Sines on the Alentejo coast in Portugal. Organised by the Sines City Council, it is a cultural public service festival. Adopting “Music with a spirit of adventure” as a motto, the festival is presented in historic and urban scenarios of great beauty and authenticity, close to a coastline with protected landscape.

Creation

The festival was created in 1999 with the aim of promoting Sines Castle – associated with the biography of the explorer Vasco da Gama –, in the form of an event which illustrated the diversity of the musical genres in the world. Today, the festival stretches beyond the physical boundaries of the castle and discovery is its philosophy.

Concept

The programme of FMM embraces and transcends the scope of world music. It is open to folk, jazz, alternative music, fusion and urban music. More than just a world music or traditional roots music festival, FMM Sines strives to discover the music of the real world as it is made and experienced in our times: music marked by associations between performers from different geographic and cultural origins, arising from the movements of ideas and people which define contemporary society.

The festival is held in the old towns of two locations in the municipality of Sines: the city of Sines (the stages located at the Castle, Avenida Vasco da Gama, Sines Arts Centre and Largo Poeta Bocage) and the village of Porto Covo (Largo Marquês de Pombal).

Background

The festival was attended by around 1,120,000 spectators from 1999 to 2017. 531 concerts were held involving over 3,010 musicians from more than 100 countries and regions.